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Allergies Can Be As Bad As Drinking For Drivers

Study shows the symptoms can impair drivers as much as an alcoholic beverage

Driving with allergies can affect your ability to safel...Driving with allergies can affect your ability to safely operate a vehicle (Shutterstock).

When you're not feeling the best, you rarely do your best. A new study found that allergies not only make sleeping and working tough, they make driving dangerous, too.

The study, originally published in Allergy, showed that driving while suffering from seasonal allergies can affect your ability to operate a vehicle as much as consuming an alcoholic drink, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Researchers in the Netherlands tested 19 patients' driving skills after giving them a dose of pollen. They then treated the symptoms with either a nasal spray, an antihistamine or a placebo and turned the volunteers loose on an easy 60-minute driving course.

Those who received the placebo did worst of all. While they were suffering from untreated allergy symptoms such as watery eyes, runny nose and fatigue, their driving performance and memory tanked. Allergy sufferers' driving skills were comparable to someone operating a vehicle with a blood alcohol content of 0.03 percent, which is close to the 0.05 percent limit in many countries in Europe.

Those are pretty scary results, considering 30 percent of adults suffer from allergy symptoms. The best course of action for allergy sufferers is to seek treatment for their condition, preferably with a steroid based nasal spray, as those patients performed best in the study.

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